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Month: September 2006

I’m not peeved any more – I’m contrite. WordPress doesn’t provide nice pre tag CSS, because it is XHTML compliant and supports the code tag. Not only that they just added a sweet new HTML editor that will make your posts XHTML compliant for you in the background. All is forgiven. Thank god I didn’t find a good free ASP.NET hosting service.

I knew I’d have to watch my tongue when the kids were old enough to be warped by my cynicism. What I didn’t realize was that I’d have to watch my nose as well. I think I may have traumatized Thomas’ the other day – I’ve convinced him that Daddy’s head may explode without warning.

It was during bath-time. I covered my face in bubbles which they both thought was hilarious, if a bit strange. The hilarity turned to horror when I blew the bubbles off my face with a big puff. Bubbles went everywhere, which I thought would also yield giggles. Instead Thomas gave out a blood-curdling scream and was inconsolable till I wiped the rest of the bubbles off my face and showed him that I hadn’t self-combusted.

Poor Sod. Now he thinks that faces are explosive, and probably thinks it will happen to him as well.

For the edification of the collective attentionstream, I have decided to quote for you the ineffable value additions and polysyllabic formulations of the “System One” post-microchunked formats – with a translation.

I am peeved. I have been writing this very long, very code-intensive blog post, and no matter what fiddling I do, I can’t get it to display the code properly. The code comes out at around 18px high. I thought it might be the post preview system in WordPress, but now I know why code fails to display properly on this damn site. WordPress have added a little ‘fundraising’ facility on the site – the ability to upload your own CSS files (for which you pay $15). And who are the most prolific bloggers? Programmers! And what do they shove in their posts? <pre> tags. Lots of them. So WordPress has sabotaged the style sheets to make sure that programmers either have to pay to display their posts properly, or leave the site.

I don’t suppose you need to try hard to guess which option I am aiming for. Can’t say I relish moving back to Blogger, but I guess I will if I am being blackmailed.

[sigh]

OK – Who knows of a good free blog hosting site, that allows me to tag my posts, and display source code properly. I must be able to talk to it from Word 2007 as well.

Like a faithless lover, I went off to sample the market of feed aggregators – I was off having a fling with Omea Reader, , leaving SharpReader to languish in a distant directory of rejection. Omea was new and exciting, but sadly was a little bit slow. Pity really, because Omea is produced by Jetbrains, makers of the indispensible Resharper, without which my life would be a barren waste of multiple edits.

So, like a thief in the night I have come slinking back to SharpReader, with my tail between my legs.

If you need a rich feed of unspeakable mixed metaphors, you could do worse than looking to SharpReader, for your daily fire hose.

I recently ran across a problem with data bound controls in ASP.NET, where I set the string formatting specification (by the book) and nothing happened. If you come across this problem you are probably missing the HtmlEncode attribute on your column specification. Without this the braces are probably encoded and thus the formatting string is unrecognisable to the control. Consider adding the HtmlEncode=”false” to your binding specifications – it worked for me.